| 摘要 |
<p>A method and apparatus are provided which eliminate the need for an active traffic flow control protocol to manage request transaction flow between the nodes of a directory-based, scaleable, shared-memory, multi-processor computer system. This is accomplished by determining the maximum number of requests that any node can receive at any given time, providing an input buffer at each node which can store at least the maximum number of requests that any node can receive at any given time and transferring stored requests from the buffer as the node completes requests in process and is able to process additional incoming requests. As each node may have only a certain finite number of pending requests, this is the maximum number of requests that can be received by a node acting in slave capacity from any another node acting in requester capacity. In addition, each node may also issue requests that must be processed within that node. Therefore, the input buffer must be sized to accommodate not only external requests, but internal ones as well. Thus, the buffer must be able to store at least the maximum number of transaction requests that may be pending at any node, multiplied by the number of nodes present in the system. <IMAGE></p> |
